During college, I worked for a couple of professors that had been building an airplane. It was not a kit, they had detailed blueprints but were responsible for obtaining all the materials. It was a pretty fun experience. One was a professor of Mechanical Engineering, but the guy who was financing the whole thing was a remarkable guy named Claes Lundgren. Dr. Lundgren was a professor in the medical school and focused his research on how humans react in extreme environments. He is one of the leading researchers in free hold breath diving, diving to extreme depths, often several hundred to even thousands of feet, with no supplemental oxygen. He also invented nicorrete gum, so he was not hurting for coin. He had a few other interesting quirks, first he had a pretty heavy swedish accent and also suffered from Alapecia. So he was sort of the brilliant hairless version of the Swedish Chef. Even though we all worked for him for free, he was very demanding and critical, but not in a mean way. It was just that he held himself to a very high standard and expected the same from us. He often remarked, quite seriously, that he had wanted to be an engineer, but didn't consider himself smart enough. So he had to settle for being a world reknowned doctor and millionaire.
Dr. Lundgren was a perfectionist. He worked constantly on this aircraft and it should have taken him about a year to complete it. When I joined the project he was on year 14. You could see the shell of an aircraft taking shape, but there was far far more to be done.
One example of the perfectionist nature was something as simple as the method of joining the two cowling sections together on the engine. The cowling is the part of the aircraft that surrounds the engie. The cowling usually resembles two nearly symmetrical semi circles. The top half is joined to the bottom half usually by way of a hinge one each side. You can remove the pin that runs the length of the hinge on either side to access the engine for maintenance. Or you can remove both pins and access the entire engine. Dr. Lundgren was not happy with using a store bought hinge, even though this was the recommended course of action. Rather, he decided that he was going to design his own hinge and fashion it out of carbon fiber and kevlar. This was going to look pretty awesome because the cowling itself was constructed of kevlar and carbon fiber, so the hinge would look like it was built in. However, the plans did not call for this, so there was no official design. Had we followed the plans, this probably would have taken a day or two, but it ended up taking months. First, there were long discussions about the best way to do this. Then, once we settled on a method, we talked about the best way to refine this method. Even though Dr. Lundgren would likely never have another opportunity to build a carbon fiber hinge, he wanted to make sure he came up with the most efficient method of doing it. This would have made sense if we were in the carbon fiber hinge business. It was all part of his magic though.
Lunches were always a fun affair. We worked out of a hangar at Niagra Falls airport. It was a pretty sleepy airport, with hardly any passenger traffic. It had the capacity to handle very large aircraft though because it was used by the Air National Guard and some of their larger cargo aircraft. In the winter, it was pretty drafty, but still comfortable enough with the heaters going. In the summer, Dr. Lundgren would often open the large hangar doors and you would sit and watch the planes go by. I should have mentioned, this was not Dr. Lundgren's first plane. He already owned a two-seater aerobatic aircraft that was parked in the hangar as well. It was quite a fun experience to shoot the breeze under the wing of one aircraft and watch aircraft roll by.
Even though Dr. Lundgren didn't pay us, per se, he made it up in other ways. He would sometimes offer to buy us lunch or take us out to dinner. Even more fun, sometimes as we were finishing lunch, he would walk around the table dropping a twenty dollar bill in front of each of us, making it rain as they say. But, what we all looked forward to the most is when he would get ready to take his aircraft out and would ask if we would like to accompany him.
His aircraft was pretty small, just a two seater. The pilot sat in front and the copilot/passenger immediately behind. Because he would fly aerobatics, you were required to wear a parachute. A couple interesting things about that: 1) As discussed above, Dr. Lundgren was an extremely thorough person, so you would have thought there would have been an extremely long and detailed brief about how to use the parachute. There wasn’t. You were simply instructed on how to put it on and that there was a rip cord. That was it. There was incredibly detailed instruction on how to get in the aircraft. It was the same level of instruction that you get when playing twister, exactly where to put your left hand, your right foot, how to turn your body in order to get in the seat. To a degree, this made sense, aircraft are fragile and it was a bit awkward to get in the back seat. Perhaps this is why the parachute discussion was so abbreviated, if you did need to get out of the aircraft it was going to be extremely difficult based on how hard it was to get in.
I went on a handful of flights, and they were all awesome. It would have been fun just to be up there, but the real fun started when Dr. Lundgren would radio in and ask the air traffic controllers for a clearance to do some “airwork”. We would then do rolls, loops, stalls and spins. When I was getting my private pilot license several years later, we were taught that spins were incredibly dangerous things and you learned how to avoid them. I can tell you, they are unnerving.
In a spin, one of the wings of the aircraft is stalled, not developing lift. The other wing is still developing lift and so, as the name implies, you spin, but you are also descending very fast. Experienced pilots will intentionally put an aircraft into a spin if they need to drop through a small hole in the clouds or just want to show off. Prior to initiating a spin, Dr. Lundgren would tell you over the radio that we were going to do a spin and that we would do three revolutions. Then he would kick the wing over hard and push opposite rudder to make the aircraft spin. You felt the aircraft drop from below you and you were pushed against the side as the aircraft banked hard. To me, it seemed like we spun around 30 times and we were moments away from hitting the ground. Then, in a very calm Swedish voice you would hear “that’s one” and what seemed like 30 spins and 5 minutes later “that’s two” and so on. All the other maneuvers, I had a general idea of where the aircraft was positioned and so on, but the spins were a different beast.
Interestingly enough, the Navy funded most of Dr. Lundgren’s research. But the Navy is a big organization and our paths never crossed again. Those times in the hangar, getting yelled at, lunch time money drops and the flights will always stand out in my mind.
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